Oscar 2007: Lose the shadow dancing. Now.

8:36: The preshow (see below) is over, and the proceedings begin with a lovely montage — by master documentarian Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line”) — featuring comments from nominees high and low, minus any identifiers. A lovely way to remind us that the movies are a craft and not always a glitterfest.

Who shaved Jack Nicholson’s head?

8:47: The first Oscar, for art direction, goes to “Pan’s Labyrinth” and I am 0 and 1 for my Oscar picks. Could this be the beginning of a collapse by “Dreamgirls”? Wait, I’m too busy listening to Maggie Gyllenhaal talk about hosting the nerd luncheon to ponder that right now.Then we go into some sort of abortive dance number and we’re off to the first commercial. Whatever happened to kicking off the evening with a biggie like best supporting actress?

8:56: The dancers forgotten for now, Will Farrell, Jack Black and John C. Reilley lead a musical number about snubbed comic actors that ends with the line “Oscar and Helen Mirren will be comin’ home with me.” Hurt only by the fact that Reilley’s flesh-toned cheek microphone looks like a hideous chancre.

9:00: Ha! Ellen Degeneres notes Judi Dench’s absence from the ceremony: “Yeah, she’s having knee surgery. [Pause] On her eyes.” I have drawn first blood with my predictions: “Pan’s Labyrinth” for makeup. (Bookmakers everywhere will be heartbroken to hear made no picks in the short-subject categories.) “There’s Jack! Did you see him?” my wife asks, pointing at Nicholson’s glossy pate, and as I’m furiously typing those words she adds,”Will you please acknowledge what your wife just said?” Blogging from home can be fun!

OK, be fair: If I picked “Flags of Our Fathers” to win this category and it went to its sibling film “Letters from Iwo Jima,” shouldn’t I get half a point or something?

9:21: At long last, best supporting actor. A major upset! Alan Arkin is such a class act that he barely has the statuette in his hand before he sets it down — like the mere token it is, I suppose — in order to get his speech out. And the speech is a lovely one about the importance of collaboration.

And now we learn that that dance troupe barely glimpsed earlier is Pilobolus, recent Capital Region visitors who … um, just made a shadow penguin.

9:31: Another recent Capital Region visitor, James Taylor, accompanies Randy Newman on a nominated song from “Cars.” And then we have Melissa Etheridge singing the theme from “An Inconvenient Truth,” about global warming. Either no one figured out the irony of that juxtaposition, or they just didn’t care.

9:45: For those concerned about Jack Nicholson: The clean look is for Rob Reiner’s “The Bucket Club,” in which Jack and Morgan Freeman plays patients in a cancer ward who hit the road with a final to-do list.

I’m happy to be wrong about best animated feature: “Happy Feet” was such a good movie, and George Miller is one of those big-hearted visionaries that we need more of.

10:01: Does William Monahan’s best adapted screenplay win betoken a best picture win for “The Departed”? And how lucky that “Marie Antoinette” winning best costumes slows, at least for a moment, the decline of my reputation as a technical-Oscar-category picker.

10:09: Did recently retired Paramount chief Sherry Lansing select Tom Cruise to narrate her bio and present her with the Jean Hersholt Award? Probably. Which is interesting, because Mr. Cruise, he’s not exactly Mr. Popular over on the Paramount lot these days since Sumner Redstone said the actor was bad for business and, y’know, fired him and all. Is this Lansing’s farewell up-yours to Redstone?

Whew, these Pilobolus shadow dances are lousy. I can do a duck and a doggie — can I be on the Oscars next year?

10:23: “Dead Man’s Chest” wins for best visual effects, and it’s well-deserved if for nothing else than the creation of Bill Nighy’s octopus-faced Davy Jones. In a year when computer animation was used to prop up a lot of cruddy scripts — like the one for “Dead Man’s Chest,” for example — if was one of the few effects that seemed worth the money and programming time.

10:35: The best thing about Jennifer Hudson winning best supporting actress might have been the way she left the stage with George Clooney following after her like a secretary trying to get her signature on a memo. Just off stage, he finally caught up to her to give her the envelope containing her name, and she looked at him as if his name was Mortimer Snerd.

10:47: Jerry Seinfeld needs to get some sort of mini-Oscar for doing a brief bit on how he’ll never clean up his mess at a movie theater (“We have a deal with the theaters : You rip us off with overpriced, oversized crap we shouldn’t be eating in the first place, and when I’m done I just open my hand”) and then introducing the documentary feature nominees as “these five incredibly depressing films.” Bracing!

11:04: Well, the wife has gone to bed and I’ve moved from the sofa to the floor. I think this is going to go on for another 90 minutes at least. Ennio Morricone’s lovely Eastwood-translated speech came close to making it bearable to listen to that, that, that song Celine Dion unleashed.

Did anyone notice that GM has worked up a new ending for the robot-suicide ad that caused so much agita after it aired on the Super Bowl? Now the device snaps awake after it passes by a junkyard where a claw is trashing GM cars, instead of offing itself by jumping off a bridge. Let’s all pay attention to the health statistics next month to see the clear effect this retooling will have on the national suicide rate.

11:16: A best original screenplay win for “Little Miss Sunshine.” Between that prize and Arkin’s win, perhaps the ground is shifting in the comedy’s direction.

11:41: I love Michael Mann — love his movies, even love listening to his DVD commentaries. But I have no idea what was going on with that tribute-to-America clipfest.

11:58: Just seconds after Helen Mirren’s classy tribute to Queen Elizabeth in her acceptance speech makes me want to move to Britain, it turns out the Pogues are now providing the music for Cadillac commercials. I’m staying here. Mirren’s win was the biggest lock of what (it seemed) was a lock-happy night, but who would deny her? Kate Winslet, maybe?

Lovely speech by Forest Whitaker, who seems genuinely shaken in an un-Mirren-ish way.

12:08: Can you imagine how utterly mortifying it would have been for Martin Scorsese to see his fellow movie brats Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg walk out to present the best director Oscar and have him NOT win? Good heavens, the looks of pity would be enough to shrivel a human heart down to a walnut.

12:13: Scorsese heads back out again as “The Departed” wins best picture, and the voiceover announcer informs us, “Martin Scorsese says ‘The Departed’ is the first of his movies to feature a plot!” Well, OK.